


the way you hold your knife

by LinguisticJubilee



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 5 Times, Dr. Stephen Socking, Family Feels, Gen, Trip-Centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-09
Updated: 2014-08-09
Packaged: 2018-02-12 00:47:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2089338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LinguisticJubilee/pseuds/LinguisticJubilee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You know,” Poppy says, “they probably expect me to give you advice.  But I’m not going to do it.” </p><p>Or, </p><p>Five times being a Triplett-Jones got Antoine into trouble and out of it again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the way you hold your knife

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brassmama](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brassmama/gifts).



> For brassmama, who wanted to know more about Trip's relationship with his grandfather, which I expanded to include...a lot more people than I originally planned. I hope you enjoy! <3
> 
> The title is taken from Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong singing [ They Can't Take That Away From Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExmoiGZuiFQ), which should definitely be listened to while reading this fic. In fact, I wrote this fic by listening to the Queen pretty much constantly :D 
> 
> Trigger Warning: There is a scene depicting a bullet wound, which I consider to be canon-typical violence. If you would like to skip this scene, skip the first section of Part 4. Please contact me if you have any questions, and above all be safe <3

**1.**

Antoine hates going undercover.

Oh, he can do it. He’s pretty good, too, if he says so himself. But there’s something itchy about wearing someone else’s skin, like he can never settle into his body right. It’s uncomfortable. Consuming a lie wholeheartedly, it shouldn’t be comfortable. The agents who really enjoy going undercover, the Romanovs and the Sitwells of the world, there’s something wrong with them. They’re running from themselves so fast they escape into another person just to get away from reality for a while. Antoine likes who he is.

All of this is a lead-up as to why he’s keeping his head down and refusing to volunteer for this mission. The team is standing around the table in the command center, listening to Coulson explain the op. Someone needs to get close to a member of the Chicago elite they believe is being mind-controlled for his fortune. Anyone else can do the infiltration. Anyone.

“Zhang and his boyfriend belong to a ballroom dancing club. Their next meeting is tomorrow at the Trump Hotel. We need two people undercover at that event to plant the bug on him. Gender doesn’t matter, but you do need to know how to dance.” Coulson’s mouth quirks up at that, and Antoine sighs.

Predictably, Simmons’ hand shoots right up. “I’ve danced since I was four,” she says eagerly, and Antoine can’t help but smile at the idea of baby Jemma twirling in a tutu. He waits for a second person to raise their hand. And waits, and waits.

After a silence bordering on uncomfortable, Antoine sighs again. “I can dance,” he says, and ignores Skye’s squeal.

He really hates going undercover.

***

Antoine is ten, and Granny is spinning him across the living room, counting to the music, “One-two-three, one-two-three, there-you-go, yes-An-toine, NO-two-three, NO-NO-NO--”

They collapse, Antoine falling in a sprawl on the carpet, Granny landing slightly more gracefully on the sofa. She laughs, hand to her chest. “Oh, I am getting too old to take a tumble like that.”

Antoine leans his head on the sofa, near Granny’s knee. “How’d you learn to dance so good, Granny?”

She looks down at him. “Did you know that me and your Grandpa lived in Germany during the Occupation?”

Antoine does know, but it’s his favorite story, so he shakes his head like he doesn't.

“Well then.” Granny cards her fingers through his hair. “The Howling Commandos were disbanded after Captain America’s death, and since the US Army couldn’t figure out what to do with your grandfather and his friends, they sent them home. And, being the riodiculous romantic that he is, Poppy didn’t tell me anything, and instead just shows up unannounced in the breakroom of the hospital.”

Antoine laughs, and Granny chuckles, too. “Yes, you’d like that, wouldn’t you. It scared the living daylights out of me, I tell you. And without so much as a ‘hello,’ he gets down on one knee, right in that breakroom, and says, ‘Beverly.’” Granny lowers the pitch of her voice to mimic Poppy’s, and Antoine laughs again. “‘Beverly, I love you so much. I watched too many fools die without telling their sweethearts that. I watched a fool die the other day who never had enough time to tell his sweetheart he loved her. Beverly, I’m a fool, but I’m done living a single day without you. Will you marry me?’”

Granny breaks the story and grins broadly, shaking her head. “What’s a gal supposed to say to that, huh? So I tell him yes, we get married, and sooner or later the Army figures out what it wants your Poppy to do. Your grandfather was going to be part of the occupation of Germany, and since we got married, I got to come too. Oh, Berlin is beautiful, baby, I hope you see it one day. Real sad, and broken, and cut in half, but beautiful all the same. I met a widow there, she used to be a dance teacher, but there wasn’t much time for dancing after the war. She didn’t have any money, see, and your Poppy and I had plenty compared to the Germans, so we came to an agreement. Every week I would come to Frau Muller’s apartment, and she would teach me how to waltz.”

Antoine and Granny sit there for a moment, listening to the music and reveling in the story. “I love you, baby boy,” she says, softly, and Antoine looks up into her twinkling eyes. “But get off your lazy bum and show me you can do a box step.”

 

**2.**

It’s another mission, and one that’s gotten Skye and Antoine stuck in a Texas ranchhouse basement for four hours until FitzSimmons (with Fitz literally phoning it in from the rehab hospital) could disassemble the forcefield that’s sprung itself around the cellar.

Skye and Antoine are amusing themselves by playing ping pong. Skye shoots one high, and Antoine laughs at her. “Shut up,” she says, smiling as she chases the ball. “Why are you playing with me, anyways? I thought ‘no junk food while on the job’ would also translate to ‘no table tennis while stuck in a blue fuzzy forcefield.”

“This is on the job,” he says. Skye serves, and he responds gracefully, because he’s excellent at ping pong. “Look, this weird biochemical thing lets oxygen in and radio signals out, the owners have stored more protein bars and jugs of water down here than would last us a week. The job, right now, is to stay calm, not go crazy, and sit on our ass.”

“Uh.” She neatly bounces the ball off the corner of his side and it goes flying. She throws her paddle in the air. “Yes! I win! In your face, Tripp! Go Skye, go Skye, I’m awesome, I’m awesome--”

The shimmery blue light at the edges of the room vanishes, and the door to the basement opens, giving the rest of the team front row seats to Skye’s victory dance.

***

Antoine is thirteen and standing on the roof of the hospital, sucking in huge, chilly gulps of air. The view is of the parking lot and the cold is beginning to seep in through his coat, but he doesn’t want to sit in that waiting room anymore. The--the _fricking_ white walls with the _fricking_ pastel paintings and the _fricking_ smell of antiseptic, he just couldn’t do it.

The door to the stairwell swings open behind him, and he turns to find his father walking towards him, a calm smile on his face. “How did I know you were going to be up here?” his dad says, laughing a little. “Got a lot of your mom in you, kid.”

Antoine turns away again. “How--how's Poppy?”

“The same.” His father stands beside him, staring out at the same parking lot. “He’s either going to pull through, or he won’t. And we won’t know until that happens.”

Right, and that’s just perfect. Antoine feels his eyes prick dangerously, and he blinks furiously. “Waiting around sucks,” he says.

His dad laughs. “Damn right it does, Antoine.”

“No,” he says, angry now. “It _sucks_.”

“What about it specifically sucks to you, Antoine?”

He rolls his eyes. “The waiting part?”

“Come on.”

“Like...I can’t do anything. I either sit at home and do nothing, or I sit in the hospital and do nothing, but it doesn’t matter in the end. Nothing I do matters.”

His dad’s quiet for a moment. When Antoine sneaks a glance, he’s got his thinking face on, the one he has when a student asks a particularly hard question in lecture. “I completely understand not being able to do anything. I mean, we’re not doctors or nurses. Well,” he smiles just a bit, “Mom’s a doctor and Grandma Bev’s a nurse, but neither of them are cardiovascular surgeons, so we’ll let that slide. So no, in that sense, we can’t do anything.

“But I question your second claim, that just because we can’t do anything, our waiting around doesn’t matter. Is it hard for you to wait around? Does it take effort?”

“Well, yeah.” Antoine’s angry still, but he’s calming down, wrapped up in his dad’s question.

“Mhm. What would you rather do than wait around?”

“Literally anything else.”

“And yet you do it anyways.”

“Of course, cause I love Poppy.”

Dad grins. “So waiting around takes effort, it’s hard, you’d rather do anything else, and yet you still do it. Because you love Poppy. That doesn’t sound like nothing, to me. That sounds like something that matters a lot.”

Antoine takes a shaky breath. He closes his eyes, and his dad grabs him into a deep hug. “You can cry, son. It’s okay, I’m gonna cry too.” Antoine hugs his dad back, letting out deep sobs. “When you’re sitting on your ass? And you’re angry about it? It means you care. It means what you’re waiting for matters. Caring is one of the most important things you can do.” They stand there on the roof, hugging and crying, until they’re calm enough to go inside.

Poppy comes home from the hospital three days later, cracking jokes with the wheelchair attendant.

 

**3.**

Simmons has gotten in the habit of picking out a trinket wherever the mission takes them and tucking it away to give to Fitz. On their way out of Flagstaff, Simmons ducks into a thrift shop and reemerges with the most terrifying sock puppet the world has ever seen. It’s a sickly greenish beige woolly thing, with black button eyes set too far apart and a mop of orange hair made of yarn that’s slowly uncurling at the ends. Skye takes one look at it and shrieks.

“No way. That thing is not coming anywhere near me, no way.”

Simmons looks at her shocked. “What? I think Stephen Socking is adorable!”

“He looks like a Muppet that’s washed out from crack abuse.”

Simmons puffs up. “I think that’s a little harsh, don’t you, Dr. Socking?”

In the middle of the night, when everybody is asleep on the Bus, Antoine sneaks down into the lab, and soundlessly searches all of Simmons’s hiding spots. He’s methodical and thorough, and despite the odd number of treasures he’s found, the sock puppet is still elusive. He stands up to stretch, and gets a flashlight shown directly into his face.

He throws his hands up. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he whispers. “But it’s creepy, I had to!”

The flashlight clicks off, and he blinks furiously to get rid of the dots in his vision. When his eyes finally adjust, May is standing in front of him, one hand clenched around Stephen Socking. “She’ll never find a body,” she promises solemnly, and disappears into the darkness.

***

“And where, exactly, do you think your going?”

Fifteen-year-old Antoine gasps and turns around. Aunt Peggy is standing at the top of the stairs, looking no less terrifying for all that she is wearing a nightgown and her gray hair is loose around her shoulders. “Let me guess,” she said frostily, stepping down the stairs, “you’re going to visit your girl? Tawnya?”

Antoine crosses his arms. This was such a bad idea. “We weren’t going to do anything--”

“Right, because you sneak out of the house at one in the morning to not do anything.” She reaches him at the bottom of the stairs and gestures to the kitchen table on the left. “Sit down. I’m going to make us some tea.” She turns her back to him and busies herself in the kitchen.

Antoine sits down at the kitchen table, hands squeezed between his knees. He’s only in D.C. for the summer, but he’s met Tawnya, and he just, he had to see her. And now he’s gone and ruined everything. He bounces up and down in his seat for a few moments, waiting. “Are you mad at me?” He blurts out suddenly. Like pulling off a band-aid. It’s easier that way, to just know how badly he messed up--

The clinking in the kitchen stops, and Antoine looks up to see Aunt Peggy staring back down at him, an unreadable expression on her face. “You are like my blood, young man. More so, really, all my brother’s family's rubbish, except Sharon. So I will say this clearly. There is nothing you could do that would make you unwelcome in my home, or unworthy of my affection.”

Antoine sighs with relief. He always forgot that Aunt Peggy’s superpower is the ability to pinpoint your insecurities and cut to them with surgical precision. “Okay.”

Aunt Peggy scrutinizes him a moment more, then nods and turns away. “You have, however, made three vital mistakes. Do you know what they are?”

Antoine snorts. “Trying to sneak out at one a.m.?”

That makes Aunt Peggy laugh out loud. “Dig a little deeper, dear.” The kettle shrieks, and Aunt Peggy brings over two cups. He watches her perform her little ritual, placing a bag in each cup and pouring water over it. She sits across from him, an eyebrow raised. “Well?”

He runs a hand over his short hair. “Like, sneaking around this late with Tawnya? And not telling anyone about it?”

She nods. “You have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. You’re allowed to be excited about a girl at fifteen. But doing it like this, in the dark? Like it’s disgraceful? You deserve better than that. Lord knows that girl deserves better than that. Take her to the movies tomorrow, bring her around for dinner sometime, do it right.” Antoine nods, slowly, understanding her. “Number two?”

“Thinking I could get the drop on you?” He guesses.

She smiles, but this time it’s a little devious. “Very good. You underestimated your opponent. I’m an old lady, Antoine, but I’m also a spy. You’ll have to try harder to get past me than you would with a normal eighty-year-old. Number three?”

Antoine freezes. He can’t think of anything. That’s not quite true, he can think of a million things he did wrong, wearing this shirt is probably one of them, but what would Aunt Peggy think was important? “I’ve got no idea,” he says finally.

“You make as much noise as an elephant,” she says. Antoine’s eyes widen in surprise, but she just scoffs. “Don’t look at me like that, young man, you can’t go bumbling around like a eight-foot toddler. You and I are going to have to work on that.”

 

**4.**

Antoine rounds the corner in the warehouse just in time to see this week’s aspiring supervillain shoot Simmons in the thigh.

“Jemma!” He shoots the guy with his ICER, but it’s not much consolation, the way her sobs echo through the empty space. He throws himself to his knees beside her and takes off his jacket to press it into her wound. “Simmons has been shot!" He yells into his comm. "I need someone here fast!” Coulson's voice is shouting back at him in his ear, but Antoine’s whole attention is on Simmons. He lifts her leg onto his shoulder, elevating the wound.

“Oh, god, oh god, oh god,” she cries. “Tripp?”

“I’m right here, Jemma, I’m right here.” She moans. “Hey! Jemma. You’re going to be fine.”

She writhes under his hands. “This...really.. _bloody_ hurts!”

Antoine laughs weakly. “You’re so strong, Jemma. You got this.”

She closes her eyes and Antoine reaches out to grab her shoulder. “Stay with me, okay? You got to tell me what to do to fix you.” She shakes her head, but Antoine doesn’t let up. “Come on, Doc, how do you treat a bullet wound?”

Simmons swallows thickly. “Ap-apply direct pressure.”

Antoine looks down at her leg and presses his jacket in harder. She groans again, and Antoine suppresses the guilt. “Alright, Jemma, looks like we got that. What’s next?”

“Umm.” She shakes her head.

“Stay with me, Jemma!”

“Lift it! Lift my leg, that’ll decrease the blood flow and, umm…”

There are echoes of footsteps and yelling from the other side of the warehouse, and a moment later Coulson rounds the corner, followed by an EMS team. The paramedic takes Antoine’s place, and he moves to kneel by her head and grasp her hand. “Everything’s going to be fine, Doc,” he says. “You’re going to be just fine.”

She stares up at him. “You know damn well how to treat a bullet wound, don’t you?”

Antoine shrugs. “Kept you calm, didn’t it?”

Her smile is weak, but it is amazing all the same. 

***

Antoine is eight, and he really loves his momma. He slowly wraps her wrist with the stretchy bandage, then places the bag of peas on top and lifts her arm up. “Done!” He cries. “You’re all better.”

His mom smiles. “Beautiful job, honey. But remember, I’m not all better _yet_. How long do you have to rest with a sprain or a bad bruise?”

Antoine squishes his face in thought. “Twenty-four hours?”

“That’s my boy. Do you want to try an ankle sprain next?”

Antoine nods his head enthusiastically. He loves playing Doctor with Momma. He sits back on the couch as she unwinds the bandage from her wrist. “Momma, did you always want to be a doctor?”

Momma laughs. “Baby, when I was your age,maybe a little older, I had a real hard time deciding what I was wanted to be when I grew up. You see, one week I would say that I was going to be just like your Poppy, and jump out of airplanes and save the world from bad guys. And the next week, I’d say that I was going to be just like your Grandma, and work in medicine and heal sick people. And I went around and around and around like that for a long time.”

Antoine pokes the bag of peas. “So how did you choose?”

“Baby boy, I’m a doctor who jumps out of airplanes to heal people the bad guys hurt. I didn’t choose.” She bops him on the nose.

 

**5.**

It takes a while for him to register that “dark” really means “your eyelids are closed, stupid.” It takes a little bit of a struggle, but he can finally wrench them open.

The hospital room is searingly bright and his head feels like it just got pounded into the floor, but he’s surrounded by his team, so it can’t be all bad. “Hey,” he croaks out, and everyone smiles.

“Hey, big guy,” Skye says brightly, sitting on his right. “You had us worried for a minute there." 

He rubs a hand over his face.  "What happened to me?" 

"You let a bridge fall on you," Coulson replies.  "You've been in and out of it for a couple days now. Think you’re gonna stick around this time?”

He lets his eyes travel around the group, landing on everybody one by one: Skye, May, Coulson, Simmons, even Fitz, his wheelchair parked next to Antoine's left. He remembers now, that there was a mission and a bad guy and too many earthquakes, but maybe that can wait until another day. “Course,” he mumbles, sliding his eyes back closed. “Who else is gonna bring the funk?”

***

Antoine is twenty-one, and The Family throws him a party to celebrate his graduation from SHIELD Academy. You have to have a certain fluency in the Gabe-Triplett language in order to function in the household. Just Us refers to their little trifecta: Mom, Dad, and Antoine. Us and The Folks is the larger blood related circle, the grandparents and uncles who actually have gene sequences in common. But you can't call it a family event until you assemble The Family, everybody, together: little Moritas chasing little Dougans down a field while the Falsworths have a bake-off against the Derniers.

Antoine is understandably surrounded all afternoon.  Everybody wants to hug him and say how proud they are of him, but Antoine still manages to sneak a few moments alone with Poppy underneath the shade of a maple tree. They share a companionable silence for a long while, before Poppy clears his throat. “You know,” Poppy says, “they probably expect me to give you advice. But I’m not going to do it.”

Antoine snorts and sips his lemonade.

“I’m serious, son. I made more dumbass mistakes in my first couple of years than in all my years put together. We all did. Some paid a high price for theirs. Others, we got away with it, long enough to learn how to stop being so stupid.

“Kid, you’re going to have a step up on a whole lot of people. You’ve got good instincts, and no kid coming out of this family is ever going to be average. But you’re still going to be a dumbass. And I wouldn’t take that experience from you if I could.”

Poppy pauses for a moment, and Antoine can hear the squeals of laughter coming from the children. “Actually, I’ve changed my mind,” Poppy says. “I will give you one piece of advice. Find your people. There'll be plenty of colleagues, good co-workers, even friends. But they won’t be your people. Find the ones whose dumbassery complements your own, who lessen the effects of your mistakes, who you can learn from. Who you have a hell of a time with. And make those people your family.”

Antoine smiles. “Sounds like a plan to me.”


End file.
